Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life

By Farah Al-Nakib

As the first Gulf city to experience oil urbanization, Kuwait City's transformation in the mid-twentieth century inaugurated a now-familiar regional narrative: a small traditional town of mudbrick courtyard houses and plentiful foot traffic transformed into a modern city with marble-fronted buildings, vast suburbs, and wide highways.

In Kuwait Transformed, Farah Al-Nakib connects the city's past and present, from its settlement in 1716 to the twenty-first century, through the bridge of oil discovery. She traces the relationships between the urban landscape, patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait. The history that emerges reveals how decades of urban planning, suburbanization, and privatization have eroded an open, tolerant society and given rise to the insularity, xenophobia, and divisiveness that characterize Kuwaiti social relations today. The book makes a call for a restoration of the city that modern planning eliminated. But this is not simply a case of nostalgia for a lost landscape, lifestyle, or community. It is a claim for a "right to the city"—the right of all inhabitants to shape and use the spaces of their city to meet their own needs and desires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9780804798570

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Al-Nakib, Farah, 1979- author.

Title: Kuwait transformed : a history of oil and urban life / Farah Al-Nakib.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048590| ISBN 9780804796392 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804798525 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804798570 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: City and town life--Kuwait--Kuwait--History. | Urbanization--Kuwait--Kuwait--History. | Kuwait (Kuwait)--Economic conditions. | Kuwait (Kuwait)--Social conditions. | Kuwait (Kuwait)--History.

Classification: LCC HT147.K9 A46 2016 | DDC 307.76095367--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048590

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

Kuwait Transformed

A History of Oil and Urban Life

Farah Al-Nakib

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

For my parents,

Nazha Boodai and Basel Al-Nakib

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

1. Pre-Oil Urbanism

2. Port City Life

3. A Cosmopolitan Community

4. Oil-Era Modernization

5. The Move to the Suburbs

6. The Privatization of Urban Life

7. The De-Urbanization of Society

8. The Right to the City

Notes

Glossary of Key Terms

Bibliography

Index

Preface

I kept thinking that there was something missing, said Maryam al-Nusif over a morning cup of hand-brewed coffee at a picnic table in the Secret Garden. Maryam was talking to me about the origins of the community gardening project she kick-started in 2014 with some friends, family, and neighbors in a derelict park in Salmiya, Kuwait’s main commercial district. The garden, in which we were sitting, is around the corner from her house. "We live in villas with high walls where we can’t even see the street. We have no connection to the pavement right outside our front doors. We like to complain about potholes and filth on our streets, but then we get into our private cars and it doesn’t really affect us. So we don’t do anything about it. There has to be something missing. By her own admission, Maryam has not been able to articulate fully what exactly this absence is; it is something she feels intuitively as a Kuwaiti. It is what stimulated her to create the Secret Garden, a seemingly inconsequential yet potentially transformative social space that encourages people in Kuwait, particularly children, to feel more connected to their natural, urban, and social surroundings. As a Kuwaiti, I too feel that something missing"; it is what stimulated me to write this book.

In his essay The Return of the Flâneur, Walter Benjamin asserts that most narrative descriptions of cities have been written by outsiders—allured by the exotic and the picturesque—rather than by natives of those cities. To depict a city as a native, he says, calls for other, deeper motives—the motives of the person who journeys into the past, rather than to foreign parts. The account of a city given by a native will always have something in common with memoirs; it is no accident that the writer has spent his childhood there.¹ From the start of this project in 2005, I have been deeply conscious of my native motives in researching and writing about urban space, everyday life, and the social order in Kuwait. As Benjamin suggests, so much of my own life and memory—and the lives and memories of my parents, who are of the generation that came of age in the first decades of the oil era in Kuwait—shaped the ideas that I explore in this book. Most of the arguments I make in the following chapters began as instincts, things I felt intuitively through my own everyday experiences, observations, interactions, and frustrations. As I began to investigate these ideas through academic research, those instincts that could stand up to rigorous scholarly analysis became my main avenues of exploration. But for me this book has always been more than an objective, academic inquiry into Kuwait’s urban social history. It has also been a deeply subjective attempt to make sense of the society of which I am a part (what C. Wright Mills labels one’s sociological imagination),² and a recognition of the importance of the spaces and places that have shaped my life and memories in ways that I have always been acutely conscious of (what David Harvey calls the geographical imagination).³ And so this is something of a memoir. Even though I have not personally lived through most of the eras discussed in this book, my own life—my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—haunts its pages, just as Michel de Certeau would say it haunts the city itself.⁴

Being Kuwaiti might give me some latitude to be critical—perhaps even somewhat idealistic—in my analyses of Kuwait’s city, state, and society, and of the ways they have changed (including within my own lifetime). However, this book is neither an indictment nor an exoneration of Kuwait’s socio-spatial development. It is, rather, an attempt at an explanation, a way of understanding the people, spaces, and places that constitute this city. While recognizing that my personal perspective as a Kuwaiti who grew up and currently lives in the city about which I am writing may result in some inherent biases, I believe that my subjectivity is more of an asset than a hindrance to my scholarly work. Kuwait, like the rest of the Arab Gulf states, is not an easy place to know without living here long-term and becoming part of the everyday life and culture. All Gulf states put up rigid barriers between insiders and outsiders that require much time and effort to penetrate before reaching a comprehensive picture of local realities. Living in Kuwait gives me insider knowledge on the subtle nuances, intricate practices, and everyday experiences of urban life that cannot be accessed solely through archival research or participant observation. At the same time, overlaying my own personal familiarity with the city with extensive archival research, oral histories with people who lived through the pre-oil and early oil periods, and urban social theory has made me think about Kuwait in jarringly new ways. Once I started on this project I began to take long walks and drives through the city and suburbs, constantly alternating the lenses through which I viewed my surrounding landscape: from a pre-oil townswoman to a foreign urban planner to a suburban citizen to a male migrant worker and so on. Experiencing the city from these multiple perspectives forced me to defamiliarize my surroundings, which admittedly made it challenging to simultaneously carry on living my own everyday life in the same city I was scrutinizing. Without a doubt, writing about Kuwait City as a native has been, in Benjamin’s words, a vertiginous experience!⁵

Acknowledgments

I have relied on many different people in many different ways throughout the production of this book. First and foremost, I am infinitely grateful to two lifelong mentors (and dear friends): Nelida Fuccaro, for her endless guidance, patience, and encouragement over the years; and Dina Khoury, for molding me into a historian. I also sincerely thank Kate Wahl at Stanford University Press for her incredible support and direction throughout this process, as well as Nora Spiegel, Mariana Raykov, Alice Rowan, Madeline Dutton-Gillett, Ariane de Pree-Kajfez, and everyone else at SUP.

This project sent me to numerous archives and libraries around the world. I thank everyone at the Asian and African Studies Reading Room at the British Library, the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the School of Oriental and African Studies’ library, the Middle East Centre Archive at St. Antony’s College (University of Oxford), the Churchill Archives Centre (University of Cambridge), the library of the National Maritime Museum in London, the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, the Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, the Center for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies at Kuwait University, and the library at the American University of Kuwait. Particular individuals made the task of conducting archival research and securing access to sources in and on Kuwait infinitely easier: Abdullah al-Ghunaim, Yacoub al-Hijji, Amal Berekaa, Amna al-Omare, Asma al-Kanan, Hana Kaouri, Saleh al-Misbah, Sadoon al-Essa, Ahmed Maarouf, Hamad al-Qahtani, Evangelina Simos, Reda al-Matrook, Charles Haddad, Michael Cassidy, Malcolm Buchanan, and everyone else who shared sources and information with me during my fieldwork. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Aruna and Zahed Sultan (and family) for trusting me to sort through the records and collections of the late Ghazi Sultan, an inspirational man and pivotal figure in the story of Kuwait City’s development. I sincerely thank the Sultan family for their generosity and support, and for their permission to use excerpts from Ghazi Sultan’s unpublished writings in this book. I also thank Mutlaq al-Qahtani, Yousef al-Kandari, and Mohammed al-Basry at the Kuwait Oil Company for giving me access to, and permission to use, images from their incredible photo archive.

I am extremely thankful to the British Foundation for the Study of Arabia (formerly Society for Arabian Studies) for awarding me a research grant to conduct oral histories in Kuwait in the spring of 2009. I thank everyone in Kuwait (particularly Ziad Rajab) who helped me identify people to interview, and all the men and women who were so generously willing to share their memories, experiences, and life histories with me. I sadly regret that a few individuals I interviewed did not live to see this book come out, but I am thankful I was able to document their memories in time. I am also grateful to the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences’ Kuwait Program at Sciences Po for providing me with a three-month research fellowship in Paris in the summer of 2012, during which the theoretical framework of this book was developed. I also thank the Guarini Institute for Public Affairs at John Cabot University in Rome (particularly Federigo Argentieri) for giving me a base at which to write in the summer of 2013.

I feel privileged to have received feedback on my work and to have engaged in countless discussions with an amazing group of scholars in the field over the years: Lawrence Potter (an incredible editor!), Diane Singerman, Reem Alissa, Mona Damluji, Ahmed Kanna, Ala al-Hamarneh, Łukasz Stanek, Roberto Fabbri, Neha Vora, and Attiya Ahmad (with whom I have walked through many cities), to name only a few. My deepest gratitude goes to friends and colleagues who meticulously read and provided feedback on parts or all of the manuscript along the way: Nelida Fuccaro, Helen Meller, Madawi al-Rasheed, Andrew Gardner, Mary Ann Tétreault, Pascal Menoret, Asseel al-Ragam, Mai al-Nakib, and Rania al-Nakib. Thanks also to Reem al-Ali for her incredible translation and research skills, and for making the last few months of this process infinitely easier on me! And a special wink to Adam Gauntlett for his expert advice as a literary agent, and for our fortuitous meeting in Paris that solidified my belief in cities as places of remarkable chance encounters.

I must recognize the many inspirational people in Kuwait who continuously awe me with their individual and collective efforts to counter the very same urban and social conditions I write about here. Their work compelled me to bring my analysis of Kuwait’s urban transformation into the present day. I am particularly grateful to those who have shared their thoughts with me: Deema al-Ghunaim, Sarah al-Zouman, Sarah al-Fraih, Abdulatif al-Mishari, Zahra Ali Baba, Besma al-Qassar, Faisal al-Fuhaid, Maryam al-Nusif, Yusra Ahmad, and Brian Collett, as well as all the new small business owners in the city with whom I have had wonderful conversations over the years. Equally motivating are my students at the American University of Kuwait, with whom I have enjoyed sharing, discussing, and rethinking several of the ideas that I examine in this book. They have inspired me in more ways than they may realize; I hope I have reciprocated.

Finally, there are a few people whose unwitting support and willingness to put up with my myriad demands on their patience and unique kindness over the years truly made the completion of the manuscript possible. Christopher Ohan, Amal al-Binali, and B. L. Morgan: without each of you I could never have finished this book. Patrick Semaan, whose life over the past ten years has been intimately intertwined with this project: thank you for your unwavering support, flexibility, and affection, and for always listening and talking out ideas with me—and of course for your expert design skills! My love and deepest gratitude go to my sisters Wijdan, Mai, and Rania for their constant encouragement, friendship, laughter, and intellectual exchange. This book is dedicated to my dear parents, Nazha Boodai and Basel al-Nakib, to whom I owe everything that I am.

Note on Transliteration

This book largely follows the English transliteration system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) for Arabic words, without diacritical marks (except for ‘ayn and hamza). For Kuwaiti names and place names, the conventional local English spelling is used instead of a transliterated version, and the ‘ayn and hamza are omitted from the first letter (for example, Salmiya instead of Salmiyya, Abdullah instead of ‘Abd Allah). Rulers are referred to by their first and middle names (for example, Abdullah al-Salem) or simply by first name if repeated in succession, without including al-Sabah. Family names are indicated with Al when referring to the family in general (such as Al Ghanim) and al- when used as an individual’s last name (as in Ahmed al-Ghanim). In most cases, Arabic words are given in Kuwaiti dialect (such as ‘abat instead of ‘abaya) and transliterated in Kuwaiti pronunciation (such as nig‘a instead of niq‘a); plurals are also kept in Kuwaiti dialect (as in diwawin instead of diwaniyyat). The only exception is suq (because this is the common English spelling), and for consistency its plural is kept as aswaq (as opposed to the colloquial swuga).

Introduction

Kuwait, the former sleepy village, has awakened with the coming of oil and is stretching its strong new limbs.

Paul Edward Case, National Geographic, 1952*

On a busy Friday night in late December 2012, twenty-six-year-old Jaber Youssef argued with four young men¹ over a parking space at The Avenues, Kuwait’s largest shopping mall. The men followed Youssef, a Lebanese national with a Kuwaiti mother, from the parking lot into the mall. One of the men purchased a meat cleaver from a store while his friends continued to trail Youssef. The four men then attacked the young dentist, stabbing him multiple times in front of hundreds of people. No witness intervened to stop the attack, nor did anyone follow the killers when they fled. Youssef bled out onto the mall floor as bystanders took photographs that were circulated through social media. His friends called an ambulance, but the paramedics took too long to reach the scene. Most entrances into The Avenues are within the underground parking garage. The mall contains a few street-front entrances but these can be reached only by the same narrow access road that leads into the garage, a road that is always gridlocked on busy weekend nights. Youssef’s friends finally took him to the hospital in their own car, and he died in the emergency room at 1:00 A.M.

The public was shocked and outraged by the crime. Blame was thrown in every direction: at the mall for the lack of security, at the parents of the stabbers for raising them as reckless youth,² at the paramedics for not getting there in time to save the victim, at the Minister of Interior for not condemning the crime quickly enough, and at the lack of moral values that has become prevalent in Kuwait.³ The latter statement was seemingly confirmed the following week. Mohammed al-Falah, a college student visiting home from the United States, was running along the paved seafront corniche in Salmiya, Kuwait’s main commercial district. He stopped to ask a group of men on motorcycles not to ride on the pavement where people walked and children played. In response, the men stabbed him, though he survived. Less than a year later, in October 2013, a twenty-four-year-old man, Jamal al-Anezi, was fatally stabbed on a busy Friday night after a fight at Marina Mall, which is connected by a pedestrian bridge to the same seaside corniche where al-Falah was stabbed. Once again the crime was watched and photographed by many bystanders. The Ministry of Interior responded to the crime by announcing a new, stringent system for security control and surveillance in shopping malls across the country.⁴ These measures did not prevent the occurrence of another fight (allegedly caused by one young man staring at the other) at 360 Mall in August 2015, which resulted in the fatal stabbing of a sixteen-year-old Kuwaiti male and the severe injury of his adversary.⁵

Though public discourse after these incidents focused on the apparent rise of violent crimes among disaffected youth in Kuwait, neither stabbings nor youth violence were new to Kuwait. Rather, what was new about these crimes was their open and public nature, which exposed another sociological phenomenon. All of the incidents occurred on busy weekends in the midst of hundreds of witnesses who chose not to intervene. This passive noninterference was not necessarily due to fear of being drawn into the violence. A few weeks after the Marina Mall murder, a man hemorrhaged to death from natural causes in the middle of a market. Though his wife screamed for help for several minutes, none of the people watching came to his assistance. Rather, a man standing very close by filmed the entire scene, including when the bleeding man began to lose consciousness, and uploaded it to YouTube. (The video has since been removed.)

The sociological explanations behind both public violent crimes and passive responses to them are undoubtedly complex and multifaceted, and neither phenomenon is unique to Kuwait. Indeed, the mall stabbings recall the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York, in 1964, when thirty-eight neighbors allegedly witnessed her late-night attack from their windows and did nothing. The New York Times focused the story on the witnesses more than on the crime itself, prompting questions about urban apathy and giving rise to the bystander effect theory: that the more people there are witnessing an emergency situation, the lower are the chances of one of those people intervening. The editor of the Times, A. M. Rosenthal, described the witnesses’ alleged apathy and indifference to their neighbor as a matter of psychological survival in the big city, the implication being that the high volume of people living in the city fostered impersonal social actions and interactions and in turn encouraged people to walk away from person-to-person responsibility.⁶ Decades later the exaggerated accusations that the Times hurled at Genovese’s witnesses were refuted: only four or five neighbors actually saw anything, at least one did call the police after the first attack, and though more may have heard Genovese’s screams, at 3:15 A.M. they did not know exactly what was going on or what they should do to help. These revelations challenged Rosenthal’s ideas on a metropolitan brand of apathy (as did the largely unpublicized fact that Winston Moseley, the killer, was captured days later in another Queens neighborhood after residents saw him burglarizing a neighbor’s house and called the police).⁷ The disputed story of the thirty-eight witnesses has also led to new social science research that is reconsidering the effects of groups on helping behavior; some scholars in particular have challenged the presentation of Genovese’s neighbors as a group rather than as a collection of individuals.⁸ The case of Youssef’s stabbing and the other Kuwaiti episodes described earlier in which groups of hundreds of bystanders did in fact watch without intervening could provide interesting material for such research on bystanders.

However, in these cases, unlike in the Genovese case, it was not the inaction of the witnesses that received the most public attention (indeed, their passive response triggered no community soul-searching in Kuwait as occurred in New York in 1964). Rather, what stunned people most was that three of the crimes—those that received the most coverage in conventional and social media—occurred in shopping malls. According to the local English newspaper the Arab Times, the residents of Kuwait consider the country’s various malls to be havens of recreation and relaxation. This unprecedented disruption has upset Kuwait’s otherwise relatively peaceful existence, cutting a little too close to the bone, for those who relish the quiet comfort of this small desert land.⁹ Malls are paradoxical places in terms of the types of social feelings and behaviors they embody. People are often lulled into a false sense of security inside them. As private, enclosed, guarded, and (in the Arab Gulf) often gilded places, they give the public good reason for feeling safer there than on downtown streets. Malls have better lighting, a steadier flow of people, and fewer hiding places and escape routes for muggers.¹⁰ In its architectural design and in the names of its shopping areas, The Avenues offers its visitors an artificial experience of shopping in a city without actually having to be in a city. Its multiple sectors include the Grand Avenue (designed to look like a British High Street or American Main Street), the SoKu (South of Kuwait, which mimics New York’s SoHo district), and the Souk (which replicates Kuwait’s own city streets). The mall thus sanitizes the idea of the city by reconstructing it as a clean and orderly place protected by roaming security guards.

But despite its idealized representation, if The Avenues really was a city district it would be what Jane Jacobs—urban writer, activist, and critic of rational city planning—would label an unsuccessful one. The bedrock attribute of a successful city district, she argues, is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street amid a large number of strangers.¹¹ In well-functioning city districts, throughout the day and night different people are doing different things simultaneously: going to work, running errands, meeting clients, sleeping on park benches, taking the kids to school, loitering, running, walking the dog, shopping, having dinner, and so on. Though this diversity makes city streets seem more dangerous and unpredictable than the seemingly protected and contained mall, it is precisely this diversity, Jacobs argues, that generates safety. The more diverse interactions and public contacts people have on a street (no matter how ostensibly marginal those encounters might be), the more feelings of mutual trust can emerge among the people who use that street. Trust in this context can be defined as an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips are down—when a citizen has to choose, for instance, whether he will take responsibility, or abdicate it, in combating barbarism or protecting strangers.¹² Though in the city most encounters between strangers are trivial and fleeting, people are silently yet constantly negotiating various public spaces—sidewalks, parks, benches, bus stops—with one another. The sum of these repeated casual contacts is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.¹³ Unsuccessful city districts are ones where that sense of public trust is lacking and where there is no diversity in activities and encounters. When the need to constantly negotiate difference is removed—as it is in a mall, where everyone is doing the same thing—one’s engagement with the public, and inherent concern for the public good, erodes. Malls, like deserted city streets, are therefore prime venues for antisocial behavior, be they acts of violence or acts of passive noninterference.

Since the late 1990s, malls have become the quintessential urban form in Kuwait and across the Arab Gulf states. Malls in the Gulf states, like malls elsewhere in the world, contribute to the privatization of cities as places governed by consumption from which diverse social groups are implicitly (by income level) or explicitly excluded. (In Qatar, for instance, security guards bar south Asian laborers from entering malls.) In her fascinating study on the daily lives of young urban women in Saudi Arabia, Amélie le Renard convincingly argues, however, that malls can also be accessible places for groups excluded from other parts of the city. For her female interlocutors, who have limited access to most public spaces in the highly segregated city of Riyadh, malls provide a sense of freedom and privacy.¹⁴ But the purpose in highlighting the ubiquity of shopping malls in Kuwait and the Gulf today is not to engage in debates about accessibility and exclusion but rather to emphasize a prominent yet problematic feature of Gulf urbanism today: the absence of diversity in urban space and everyday life experiences, and the impact that this absence has on the functioning of society.

The Modernist Project

Kuwait Transformed analyzes the intricate relationship between the urban landscape, the patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait, and traces the historical transformation of these three interrelated realms in the shift from the pre-oil era to the oil era. In the two centuries between its founding in 1716 and the launch of its oil industry in 1946, Kuwait developed into an independent and prosperous port with an ever-growing population engaged primarily in trading, shipping, and pearling, as elsewhere along the Gulf coast (see Chapter 1). The advent of oil and the accession to power of Abdullah al-Salem in 1950 triggered a massive state-led modernization project over the next four decades (see Chapter 4) that transformed Kuwait—city, state, and society alike—in irreversible ways. The first step in this transformation was the state’s commissioning of a master plan in 1951, with the aim of making Kuwait City the best planned and most socially progressive city in the Middle East.¹⁵ By connecting urban planning with social progress, the Kuwaiti ruler echoed the city-planning discourse of the high modernist avant-garde led by Le Corbusier and the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). The premise of modernist city planning in the decades after World War I was social transformation. Rather than seeing transformations in urban form and organization as by-products of changing social conditions, CIAM’s development inversion saw modernist architecture and planning as the means to create new forms of collective association, personal habit, and daily life.¹⁶ That is, urban form and organization were instruments of social change.¹⁷ Furthermore, as James Scott explains, modernist planning ideology required a powerful state with unrestrained power to achieve these designs, as well as a prostrate civil society that lacked the capacity to resist the new plans. Abdullah al-Salem was the ideal modernist ruler with grandiose and utopian plans for his society coupled with unlimited oil revenues, while their sudden affluence made the populace more receptive to a new dispensation (thereby obviating all resistance).¹⁸

Though the Kuwait City that oil built was not designed on quite the monumental scale on which CIAM cities such as Brasília and Chandigarh were designed, from 1950 onward centralized planning became a key state strategy of social control and served as a bulwark against the substantial economic, political, and social upheavals brought about by oil. Oil disrupted every aspect of life in Kuwait, and total state-led planning as advocated by Abdullah al-Salem could help weed out future threats to state stability and control. Urban planning in particular would make the city and, by extension, the future knowable. The purpose of city planning from the days of Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century was to minimize the chances for unpredictable and uncontrollable actions (such as social insurrections) in the city.¹⁹ Urban plans—with all the maps, statistics, and projected goals that went into their making—made it possible to think about the city (of today and tomorrow) as a unified, orderly whole rather than as a collection of disjointed, disorderly parts.

As Kuwait’s oil revenues went directly into the hands of the ruler, the government claimed it was responsible for society’s well-being in order to make up for years of suffering in the pre-oil phase.²⁰ More accurately, the massive state-led modernization project—which included both the transformation of the city as well as the creation of a cradle-to-grave welfare system—minimized the risk of public protest against the substantial increase in political power and autonomy that oil brought the Al Sabah rulers and their burgeoning state. With the country’s overnight shift from scarcity to affluence, a new era, a new life could be constructed from scratch,²¹ one that made people forget the pre-oil past (a time when the rulers played a minimal role in public welfare and governance) and look toward a brighter future—under the patriarchal leadership of Abdullah al-Salem. Like most modernist projects, building this future required total decontextualization, or what James Holston calls a strategy of defamiliarization.²² This process began with the systematic demolition of the pre-oil port town—giving the state the blank piece of paper that, according to Le Corbusier, was essential to achieve total efficiency and total rationalization—and the construction of a brand new cityscape in its place.²³

Kuwait experienced the shift from a maritime town to a sprawling city with remarkable speed. British anthropologist Peter Lienhardt visited Kuwait in 1953 to study a society in flux. When he arrived at the city gates, the commotion of digging and building gave one the feeling that the whole city of Kuwait was a vast construction site.²⁴ Zahra Freeth grew up in Kuwait in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the daughter of a British political agent. After a visit in 1970 she wrote, The town of my childhood had gone. . . . it had been destroyed as effectively, if not as brutally, as by an earthquake.²⁵ In only two decades, Kuwait had seemingly hurtled out of medieval simplicity into twentieth-century complexity.²⁶ In 1983, Stephen Gardiner, an architect and a writer for the Observer, made a similar observation:

There was no breathing space between ancient and modern, rags and riches; from a tiny place in the sand on the edge of the Gulf . . . Kuwait hurtled like a missile into the high technology of the mid-twentieth century. And over the next thirty years, the new city of Kuwait—optimistic, imaginative, confident and utterly modern—was conceived, planned, built, replanned and rebuilt. The unique creation of oil, the story of this city is astonishing.²⁷

Though the city’s physical transformation was indeed substantial, this linear rags-to-riches narrative (constantly reiterated by the Kuwaiti state) conceals the tensions, paradoxes, and problems that characterized Kuwait’s oil-driven modernization in the shift from scarcity to affluence. The complex social, political, and spatial realities behind this facade form the subject matter of this book.

The Modernist Paradox

The rapid transformation of Kuwait’s urban landscape gave rise to a radically different lifestyle (see Chapters 2, 5, and 6). The townspeople moved from crowded, traditional courtyard houses in close-knit neighborhood clusters into large single-family villas in spacious American-style suburbs. Their formerly complex and diverse everyday lives in functionally mixed and integrated urban spaces became fragmented into discrete functional zones and privatized spheres of behavior. The ways in which these spatial and lifestyle